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Did Hell Just Freeze Over? Here's Evergreen On Gallium3D!

09-09-2010, 11:50 PM

Phoronix: Did Hell Just Freeze Over? Here's Evergreen On Gallium3D!

The Linux community is still in awe from today's announcement that Broadcom has released an open-source WiFi driver for their newest 802.11n chipsets after not backing any Linux support for their wireless hardware in years past. In the Phoronix IRC channel the question was jokingly begged if hell has frozen over, but now we have another announcement to share today, which makes us wonder if hell has really frozen over. No, we aren't sharing more news right now on Valve's Steam/Source Linux client that's still coming, but that there is now Gallium3D support for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" series!..

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Kudos indeed, that was quick! There's still plenty of bugs in r600c/evergreen, makes me wonder if it's even worth fixing them.

That's something we'll all have to figure out pretty quickly - not just for Evergreen, but if (hypothetically) we were working on another GPU generation it would be important to decide which tree we should use for working on *that* support as well.

(nuts, just rubbed my eye after cutting up scotch bonnet peppers... back later)

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That's something we'll all have to figure out pretty quickly - not just for Evergreen, but if (hypothetically) we were working on another GPU generation it would be important to decide which tree we should use for working on *that* support as well.

Based on statements you and other X developers have made in the past, I would definitely hope that you will settle for writing all future Radeon drivers exclusively with Gallium+KMS.

Also, it would help enormously with building up Gallium3d expertise within AMD if you task your developers with improving the general parts of Gallium3d, not just the Radeon-specific stuff. I don't know how Alex and Richard work, but when I am programming, I learn a lot more about a component when I am actually hacking on it than when I am hacking using it. Once your guys know as much about the Gallium architecture as Brian Paul, you'll be in a much better position to insist upon Gallium-only drivers.

I say that because I am under the impression that you wrote Evergreen support for r600c first partly because you felt that your in-house developers didn't know Gallium well enough to do it there from the get-go, and partly because you felt the Gallium core wasn't "ready" to fully support Evergreen. If there is any truth to either of these statements, you could simultaneously attack both problems by having your guys improve Gallium in collaboration with VMware's (nee Tungsten's) developers. I am sure they would appreciate that, and you would be helping to lay the groundwork for r800/r900 support at the same time as providing your developers with invaluable experience working on the new stack. Great stuff all around.

Michael has a point that, given the extremely limited manpower available for the open source graphics stack, it is a waste of effort to write two quite-different drivers for the same hardware. If it were a matter of simply copy and pasting whole files unmodified, you could have written r800 support for gallium to begin with. Obviously it is a different enough architecture that you chose not to use it for evergreen. But I think I've seen you mention (representative of consensus these days, it seems) that Gallium3d is "the future". Why not start now, or at least start with r900, by never even beginning work on an r900c driver?

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That's something we'll all have to figure out pretty quickly - not just for Evergreen, but if (hypothetically) we were working on another GPU generation it would be important to decide which tree we should use for working on *that* support as well.

Is there even a question? The Gallium3D driver might not have full parity yet, but it's definitely the future. Why spend the effort investing in the past, instead of fixing the gaps in R600g?

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That's something we'll all have to figure out pretty quickly - not just for Evergreen, but if (hypothetically) we were working on another GPU generation it would be important to decide which tree we should use for working on *that* support as well.

(nuts, just rubbed my eye after cutting up scotch bonnet peppers... back later)

I hope you had a relieving trip to the eyewash station!

Well, I'm pretty sure AMD is working on a new, shinier GPU. I can understand if you don't feel free to share details. Also, I can understand that you can't guarantee anything wrt support of new hardware on behalf of AMD until you receive official approval. Perhaps there are other limits as well.

I've been using r300g for half a year now, and the features and performance have been sufficiently impressive that I don't see any code maturity reasons why the next gen couldn't just use Gallium. If the horses in your stable are more comfortable fleshing out the hardware using classic, then definitely go that route. If that's not a factor, I say go Gallium.

Do you have plans to set aside some resources for as close to 0 day support for Bobcat as possible? If so, fantastic!

Lastly, have you a recipe recommendation to use such potent peppers for?

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OK, down to a dull burn now. Think I'll use gloves when I cut up the Naga Jolokias (yeah, chili night at Chez Bridgman this weekend, how did you guess ?)

Anyways, this is great news.

I'm a hot peppers fan myself, though I usually try to make chili with a mix of moderate peppers. Cubanelles and jalapenos are a staple here, but we've also tried habanero chilis (the less painfully hot variety), Anaheims and Serranos. Of course, I also tend to add Cayenne pepper (dried powder) in generous amounts, and that is pretty hot.

I looked up the Naga Jolokia -- holy moly those things are hot! Looks like they're the hottest pepper short of police-grade pepper spray: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale I'm not sure I'm brave enough to go that far, although my scoville resistance has built up over the years to the point that I can basically pop jalapenos as a snack; they no longer give me any burning sensation.